1,599 research outputs found
Distributed Reasoning in a Peer-to-Peer Setting: Application to the Semantic Web
In a peer-to-peer inference system, each peer can reason locally but can also
solicit some of its acquaintances, which are peers sharing part of its
vocabulary. In this paper, we consider peer-to-peer inference systems in which
the local theory of each peer is a set of propositional clauses defined upon a
local vocabulary. An important characteristic of peer-to-peer inference systems
is that the global theory (the union of all peer theories) is not known (as
opposed to partition-based reasoning systems). The main contribution of this
paper is to provide the first consequence finding algorithm in a peer-to-peer
setting: DeCA. It is anytime and computes consequences gradually from the
solicited peer to peers that are more and more distant. We exhibit a sufficient
condition on the acquaintance graph of the peer-to-peer inference system for
guaranteeing the completeness of this algorithm. Another important contribution
is to apply this general distributed reasoning setting to the setting of the
Semantic Web through the Somewhere semantic peer-to-peer data management
system. The last contribution of this paper is to provide an experimental
analysis of the scalability of the peer-to-peer infrastructure that we propose,
on large networks of 1000 peers
Extending the Extensional Lambda Calculus with Surjective Pairing is Conservative
We answer Klop and de Vrijer's question whether adding surjective-pairing
axioms to the extensional lambda calculus yields a conservative extension. The
answer is positive. As a byproduct we obtain a "syntactic" proof that the
extensional lambda calculus with surjective pairing is consistent.Comment: To appear in Logical Methods in Computer Scienc
Representing First-Order Causal Theories by Logic Programs
Nonmonotonic causal logic, introduced by Norman McCain and Hudson Turner,
became a basis for the semantics of several expressive action languages.
McCain's embedding of definite propositional causal theories into logic
programming paved the way to the use of answer set solvers for answering
queries about actions described in such languages. In this paper we extend this
embedding to nondefinite theories and to first-order causal logic.Comment: 29 pages. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
(TPLP); Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, May, 201
On the strength of proof-irrelevant type theories
We present a type theory with some proof-irrelevance built into the
conversion rule. We argue that this feature is useful when type theory is used
as the logical formalism underlying a theorem prover. We also show a close
relation with the subset types of the theory of PVS. We show that in these
theories, because of the additional extentionality, the axiom of choice implies
the decidability of equality, that is, almost classical logic. Finally we
describe a simple set-theoretic semantics.Comment: 20 pages, Logical Methods in Computer Science, Long version of IJCAR
2006 pape
What's Decidable About Sequences?
We present a first-order theory of sequences with integer elements,
Presburger arithmetic, and regular constraints, which can model significant
properties of data structures such as arrays and lists. We give a decision
procedure for the quantifier-free fragment, based on an encoding into the
first-order theory of concatenation; the procedure has PSPACE complexity. The
quantifier-free fragment of the theory of sequences can express properties such
as sortedness and injectivity, as well as Boolean combinations of periodic and
arithmetic facts relating the elements of the sequence and their positions
(e.g., "for all even i's, the element at position i has value i+3 or 2i"). The
resulting expressive power is orthogonal to that of the most expressive
decidable logics for arrays. Some examples demonstrate that the fragment is
also suitable to reason about sequence-manipulating programs within the
standard framework of axiomatic semantics.Comment: Fixed a few lapses in the Mergesort exampl
Quantifier-Free Interpolation of a Theory of Arrays
The use of interpolants in model checking is becoming an enabling technology
to allow fast and robust verification of hardware and software. The application
of encodings based on the theory of arrays, however, is limited by the
impossibility of deriving quantifier- free interpolants in general. In this
paper, we show that it is possible to obtain quantifier-free interpolants for a
Skolemized version of the extensional theory of arrays. We prove this in two
ways: (1) non-constructively, by using the model theoretic notion of
amalgamation, which is known to be equivalent to admit quantifier-free
interpolation for universal theories; and (2) constructively, by designing an
interpolating procedure, based on solving equations between array updates.
(Interestingly, rewriting techniques are used in the key steps of the solver
and its proof of correctness.) To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
successful attempt of computing quantifier- free interpolants for a variant of
the theory of arrays with extensionality
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